


Silence in the Vacuum

by xaviul



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, Helmstrolls, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 05:27:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16717333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaviul/pseuds/xaviul
Summary: Your focus was on the helm block, and switching on your phone to the map that Oddscrap had given, you followed it down the still and empty rooms.It was a longer path than it would have been in the ship’s prime- a blow had ruptured the compression of part of the ship, and you’d need to wait to sort through the locked off areas until you had the spacesuits out. As you cut through the detour, your eyes just can’t seem to help but roam over the rooms you pass through. How odd, you marvel, that you feel like the ghost in the room, rather than the souls of the trolls who were doomed here. But it’s a fleeting sensation, one driven away by the draw of breath in your lungs and the beat of your pumper in your breast. If you shed a tear over every troll who died, you’d just never have time for anything else! It was a shame they hadn’t had the sense to agree to your terms, but you could only move on and use their loss for something good.You had clients hungry for parts, after all. And helms, if you managed to keep this one alive.Business is Lethal, when it comes to Alternia- and when these vultures come to roost, they plan on a feast.





	Silence in the Vacuum

**Scrapper Sweetlip | 16 Sweeps | Edges of Alternian Space**

The thing no one can ever prepare for about space is how quiet it is. How the silence between planets, between galaxies and stars can stretch on and on for so long and make a troll realize how insignificant they really are, in the grand scheme of things. Just a single grain of sand on a beach in the timeline of trollkind, and the universe? It was so massive that you might as well just be a single amoeba, floating on and trying to make some sort of an impact.

It could drive a troll mad, how meaningless it all was. How insignificant. Fortunately for you, you had never been much of a philosopher, and you didn’t bother to think past the endless expanse. You were no general, always on the edge of the battlefield and always thinking about the next battle and the next tracks of territory you could claim for an ever-hungry Empire. You were no foot soldier to worry about what you would be facing next, good for nothing but killing and taking orders. You were a scrapper, and you made your own orders. And the only time you came across anything like what the Fleet would want from you was after the carnage was over.

Vultures, some like to sneer about you, but their disdain never keeps them from buying your merchandise. Some things never changed no matter where you were, you guess, and just like how you never felt shame about your position on the Rickshaw you didn’t bat an eye at the insults. Maybe you were a vulture! Maybe a hyena, some carrion-eater that everyone loved to look down on but never realized were important to the ecosystem. Just like how carrion-eaters would strip the meat from a corpse clean so that it didn’t dirty the environment, or rise up as a zed, you stripped out the carcasses of ships that dirtied up the pathways between planets, keeping everything neat for the other ships.

No one wanted to hyper-drive right in to some freighter husk, you reasoned, so why did they cry about what you did?

…Okay. You totally know why they did, you amend as Oddscrap sent in the all-clear that the ship you had been stationed around for four nights was stabilized again. But you just didn’t see how they could when they were benefiting off it just as much as you were, just without any of the actual work put in. Your hands were steady on the controls as you launched the boarding sequence to connect your ship with your new prize, waiting for the automatic sequence to set in before you messaged Oddscrap back.

 **SS:** How is the helm looking? We got a salvage job going on it, or do we have to call it a bust?  
 **OD:** :thumbs_up:  
 **SS:** That’s not very clear of you, dumpling. T.T But I’ll be right down.

Your ship chimed the all-clear of a successful connection and you were free to swing your chair around to stand, arms spread wide as you sashayed out of the cockpit and towards your waiting crew. “Alright, we know the drill! No sticky-fingers, everything of value gets brought in and divided equally, and work in teams. Clearray, your group gets to handle private quarters this time! Gutwyrme and their crew are already in the command deck, doing all the heavy lifting to make sure we get to do the inner deconstruction without having to wear our spacesuits, bless that troll and their ability to get any busted life support system back online.”

Your counting your points on your fingers, each flick reminding you of the next comment you had to make. “Check your phones, Oddscrap has already got the blueprints uploaded and has marked off the airlocked zones. Don’t go prying any of those open, now! Respect the dead but make sure you get anything off them we need, use the hovercarts so we can get as much off as we can as quickly as we can, and we got two other ships coming in tomorrow to help with the major scrapping. Oh, and have fun with it. Any concerns, you know who to call!”

You grin wide, to show the last is no joke. You always handle business in the crew, because how else would you make sure it wouldn’t come back and bite you in the ass later? There’s the murmur of assent and as it fades you’re already heading out of the room, letting them all get ready for the shift ahead of them as you make your way down to the docking station. You’d be laboring with the rest of your crew soon enough, but you were the captain around here, and that meant you had other obligations- like taking a good first look around your work area.

The HSC Single-Howl-That-Is-Joined-By-The-Pack has seen better nights, but you’d known that. A Cruiser, it had been used before as a quick and speedy vessel to make relays between larger, slower warships before someone had blasted it up. Their rescue signal had told you that they’d had enough power to hyperjump out of the main fray of battle, but that escaping their definite destruction had left them without the power to get to any station. They’d rolled the dice, and the only one that had heard their message was you.

Bad luck on their part, but you weren’t a monster. You’d come, and after you had made sure that your jammers was making sure they couldn’t get into contact with anybody else, you’d given them the same message you gave every ship that still had a living population. You kindly laid out that you had them trapped, and that their only chance of escaping was to give everything over to you- ship, possessions, credits and all.

Smart trolls took the offer. You didn’t leave them to die if they agreed to your terms, you just locked them up nice and tight in your brig until you got their ship dealt with, and then you spit them out at the closest port that you wouldn’t get arrested at. Unfortunately for these trolls, they weren’t so smart, and held out on the hope that someone else would come across them.

Signs of their foolishness were clear as soon as you stepped foot onto the ship and came across your first corpse. As far as deaths go, you think they had an easier time than most- they’d taken a hit to their oxygen recyclers, one they hadn’t been able to fix. They’d just run out of air, and the yellowblood looked almost peaceful in their death, features slack and body curled in the hallway. They had probably just gotten sleepy and dozed off, never to wake again. Was that so bad?

You leave them where you find them, sure your crew will look them over for jewelry or other goods when they come down. Your focus was on the helm block, and switching on your phone to the map that Oddscrap had given, you followed it down the still and empty rooms.

It was a longer path than it would have been in the ship’s prime- a blow had ruptured the compression of part of the ship, and you’d need to wait to sort through the locked off areas until you had the spacesuits out. As you cut through the detour, your eyes just can’t seem to help but roam over the rooms you pass through. How odd, you marvel, that you feel like the ghost in the room, rather than the souls of the trolls who were doomed here. But it’s a fleeting sensation, one driven away by the draw of breath in your lungs and the beat of your pumper in your breast. If you shed a tear over every troll who died, you’d just never have time for anything else! It was a shame they hadn’t had the sense to agree to your terms, but you could only move on and use their loss for something good.

You had clients hungry for parts, after all. And helms, if you managed to keep this one alive.

You rapped your knuckles against the sealed doors of the helm block, leaning your body against the side of the doorway as you waited. “Oddscrap, I hope you have good news for me in there~” You call, even though it’s entirely possible that she can’t hear a lick of it- most trolls liked to have the helm block sound dampened, since they could be noisy fucks sometimes. Who wanted to listen to a helm screeching? Not you, that’s for sure. Thankfully when the door hissed open, there was silence on the other side- and Oddscrap, who poked her head out to give you her least impressed look she could manage.

Which was pretty unimpressed, you could give her that. But you give her your best smile and reach to chuck under her chin, laughing when she growls over it. Oddscrap was the third Rickshaw in your crew, brought on when you’d come down one night. She was as odd as her name, but she earned her keep- even if looking her in the eyes was always a bit of a queasy sight. Trolls just weren’t supposed to have six pupils, that was all!

She pulled back into the block when you reach for her again, and you finally have to pull yourself up straight to follow her inside. You hate helm blocks, if you’re honest with yourself! Everything about them is just awful, from the very first breath you take in of the humid air of the block as the door seals behind you. It’s as damp as a rainforest in the block, kept stifling in order to keep the biowires that coat the entire room in peak condition. The moisture puddles on the ground and your boots squelch across it, but you keep your traction as you move towards the center of the room to look at the main attraction.

Helm blocks were always situated somewhere in the center of a ship, as insulated from the blasts a ship could take as possible. No ship could truly function without a helm to power it, and certain safeguards were always taken to preserve it. You doubt the helm block ever lost as much oxygen as the rest of the ship, and that as soon as the reserves had dwindled the helm had been shut down to make sure it didn’t use anything but what it needed to stay functional.

“Got it up for a bit,” Oddscrap tells you as she perches on top of the control module, teeth a bright flash in the lowered lights of the block. “Doesn’t look like it sustained any lasting damage from being put under. It’s a little thin, but some of them are just naturally leaner no matter how much nutrition slurry they get funneled in to them.”

“You didn’t tell me it was a Gem-Gamma,” you breathe out as you stop in front of the column. It all looks to be in good shape, which is great- you wonder if the helmtech was one of the trolls to be caught in a depressurized room when the ship got hijacked, since there’s no sign of them here. Smart techs always hide out in the block where things are safer, but maybe they were only good with the wire. Your new helm is as limp as it can be, head lolled forward to hang against its chest, but it can’t hide the bright mustard sign that has been incorporated in to its helmsuit. Every captain drools over Gemini-Prime, and who can blame them? You just don’t get too many lines producing heavy-hitters like a Gem-Prime, but they just don’t pop out as often as the fleet might want. More common are the branch-offs of the line, the lines of the Gemini symbol modified to show that you aren’t dealing with the prime cuts, but you still had something worth quite a bit if you can get it functional again.

“Did it communicate any? Please don’t tell me it’s one of those screamers, I don’t want to have to deal with devocalizing it,” you’re talking to Oddscrap even as you start to push biowire out of the way, trying to find the connection ports to make sure there’s no nasty surprises there. Oddscrap wasn’t kidding about it being scrawny, you decide rather quickly- hanging in a column, no helms are exactly muscular. All definition fades away pretty quickly unless a tech pampers it with some physical therapy to keep it, and all of that is mostly for cosmetics anyways. Your Gem-Gamma wasn’t that pampered, but it didn’t have too hard of a life before you showed up either.

The first limb you find is neat work, what was once an arm withered away and neatly amputated to a stump. The arm-ports all look clear, and when you pull a wire from one to check the connectivity it comes out with the right amount of resistance and slips back in just as well. Its hair is a little unruly for your tastes, just more maintenance that needs to be taken care of when a helm has so many other needs, but at least they keep it buzzed out of the way for the neck ports. Your Gem-Gamma was no Program helm by the look of their ports, which is a shame. Those program raised ones are always just so much more docile, and they fetch a higher price! No matter though, you decide quickly enough- it was the power levels that mattered more than the origin.

And the age. But the installation code tattooed neatly by the ports labeled this helm as only 13 sweeps old, and with barely any marks of burnout on it. You really couldn’t believe your luck as you circled your attention back towards the front of it, working the helm goggles that were supposed to help keep its eyes from drying out and keep it focused out of the way to see what else you were working with.

Once upon a time, Gem-Gamma had been a looker of a troll. Doubled fangs were just long enough that the points of them stuck out from under their top lip, with a heart-shaped face and a cute little nose. Its eyes were closed with the last shut-down but you carefully eased them open, one eye at a time, and whistled low at what you saw. “Oddscrap, you minx, you knew I would love this one!” You accuse as you drop their head and turn around to face the Cerulean.

“Of course I did,” the cerulean told you smugly, leaning her head back in a wave of tiny braids. They chimed as she tilted her head, from all the little tidbits she tied in to them, momentos that she liked that somehow all worked together in a way you refused to ever admit to her. “I didn’t need to read your mind for that. And I knew you’d want to see it all for yourself if you could, instead of hearing it over the commchat. So surprise, boss.” She sounds so smug, but damnit, why wouldn’t she? Every bit of what she said was right, the minx.

“Red and blue eyes, even,” you say, but this time it’s mostly to yourself. “‘Red and blue, always true’, they don’t just make up those silly little sayings for fun. And so young! Its golden sweeps, mind the pun, haven’t even started. My customers would fight to the death over the chance to have this smart little number gracing their column.” You clasp your hands in front of you as you watch the helm, mnd full of possible numbers.

“Orrrr…” Oddscrap drawls, and who needs a devil on your shoulder when you have a Rickshaw troll in your gang? You frown at her and all she does is smirk at you, because she knows that the idea she wanted to plant in your pan has already taken root. “Orr,” you repeat, slow as you try to fight against it, but it’s a losing battle. “My helm isn’t in its prime anymore. Isn’t it better to sell it off now before it loses anymore value? I’m never going to find anything better than this helm, especially for free. And if I put in the papers, I can have a chance at buying up a descendant from it too, if its ratings are good. You didn’t happen to get the ratings for it, did you?”

Oh, did you say she looked smug before? She’s absolutely smug now, mottled lips pulling in to a smirk. “Of course I did. 6/7/9, captain. Don’t know what favors the captain had to pull to get it on a ship like this, it’s more warship potential.” Your mind was racing again, but in a new direction now as you reach to put the goggles back over those closed eyes, a smile growing across your face.

It’s absolutely a waste, any troll will agree, to put a Gem-Gamma of this magnitude in to a ship like yours. Any troll worth their chrome would be aghast, but the thought wasn’t detracting you at all. You loved the sheer opulence of it, how trolls will never expect the sort of firepower you can pull out with a helm like this. You laughed just to get some of your joy out, whirling back to Oddscrap to give her another chuck under the chin.

“I’ll take it! Call Gutwyrme up here to get it disconnected and brought over. Tell them to put it on some of the fortified slurry to see if we can get it pepped up for a while, make the transition easier. Oh Oddscrap, you minx, this is going to be absolutely fabulous.” You whirl back around to take in your shiny new helm again with wide eyes, fingers spread over your mouth just to try and contain yourself.

Sometimes you fretted over the opinion of other trolls. But on nights like this, you knew the universe just had to approve. Good things happened to those who deserved them, all the tales of old told you that. Good things happened to you, so despite what trolls might try and say, how they might look down on you…

Well. May the Mother Grub bless the carrion-eaters.


End file.
